Being a loving father is admirable. Unless you’re a Trumper.
So many families can relate to what the Bidens have gone through.
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By David R. Lurie
As a result of a scheme put in motion back in 2020 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr, Donald Trump and his cronies finally got what they wanted for years: Hunter Biden was charged and convicted of a crime.
So why are they so unhappy? Maybe because the case against Hunter has made his father look like who he actually is: a compassionate dad who loves and cares for his son. The trial also made Hunter look like who he actually is: a flawed man who paid a high price for his catastrophic addiction to drugs and other personal crises and has struggled to turn his life around, rather than the arch financial criminal in league with his dad that Republicans have portrayed him to be.
The trial was embarrassing, but far less for Hunter Biden — who long ago in a memoir bared the truth about his addiction and the huge costs he imposed on both his family and himself — than for Special Counsel David Weiss and his team, who were revealed to be trophy hunting prosecutors determined to make the trial of a minor charge as deeply painful as possible for everyone close to him.
It’s no wonder that a juror interviewed soon after the verdict said “I really don’t think that Hunter belongs in jail,” and observed that Biden had made his own prosecution more likely by doing the responsible thing and not taking back possession of the gun that his brother’s widow had thrown in a trash bin.
Weaponized justice, but not in the way Republicans claim
During his tenure as Trump’s AG, Barr's many schemes to protect his boss blew up in his face as frequently as they succeeded. For example, Barr tried to conceal Trump's attempt to extort Ukrainian President Zelenskyy into "investigating" Joe Biden, but ended up getting Trump impeached for the misconduct. The special counsel Barr named to "investigate" the Russia investigation lost two trials and was ultimately revealed to be a partisan conspiracy theorist who served as Barr’s travel companion.
Perhaps Barr's most insidious legacy, though, was his DOJ’s efforts to ensure that Weiss, a notoriously aggressive Republican prosecutor who had prosecuted some of Joe Biden’s local political allies, would be in charge of investigating Hunter even after Trump left office.
Hunter Biden had been the subject of FBI investigation for potential tax offenses under the jurisdiction of Weiss’s office as early as 2018. Following the 2020 election, many Republicans began calling for the naming of a special counsel to investigate him. Those calls came in the wake of Rudy Giuliani’s unsuccessful effort to use the misappropriated (and possibly tampered with) contents of Hunter’s laptop, particularly the salacious portions, as part of a scheme to influence the election outcome.
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As Barr was engineering his exit from the Trump administration in the wake of the election — and trying to distance himself from what he then perceived to be the fiasco of the brewing “stop the steal” movement — he declared that he had rejected entreaties to name a Hunter Biden special counsel. What later became clear, however, was that Barr, correctly, saw no need to appoint a special counsel to oversee what was then a tax-related inquiry, since Weiss was already on the job. Barr likely (and correctly) anticipated that Biden’s AG would not dare replace Weiss.
After an exhaustive five-year investigation, Weiss’s office negotiated an entirely fair resolution of the only potentially meritorious charges against Hunter Biden that entailed a “deferred prosecution” agreement on the gun application matter, misdemeanor guilty pleas on the tax matters (arising from the non-payment of taxes Biden had already remitted), and an agreement not to pursue any other charges, including related to Ukraine. By all accounts at the time, this deal was expected to be, and should have been, the end of the investigation.
Then, however, yet another GOP ginned up non-scandal intervened as purported “whistleblowing” IRS investigators claimed for no cogent reason that the Trump-appointed Republican Weiss had chosen to go easy on Biden and that his authority had been constrained by Attorney General Garland. Weiss strenuously denied these conspiracy theories, but he was also plainly concerned with claims that he was being “soft” on someone Republicans had targeted as a political enemy.
So it should have come as no surprise that when Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Trump appointee who had relatively little criminal experience, began to raise (meritless) objections to the carefully negotiated plea deal during a 2023 hearing, a member of Weiss’s team chose to side with the judge against the agreement his boss had executed.
By the end of that hearing, Weiss had effectively been left free to renege on his plea agreement, and he jumped at the opportunity, despite the obvious ethically problematic nature of the move. (A California judge later ruled that, while the agreement Weiss had struck with Biden was in fact a binding contract, he could avoid complying with it because a parole department official had not countersigned.)
Freed from the duty to comply with his own agreement, Weiss, at his own request, was appointed in August 2023 as a special counsel by Biden’s AG, Merrick Garland. Weiss then sought to curry favor with GOP critics by throwing the book at Hunter Biden, charging him in two federal courts with every crime he had a good faith basis to charge, including multiple felony tax offenses and the charge of lying about his drug use when purchasing a gun he did not even fire once.
Despite his transparent pandering, Weiss did not make the Trumpish heart of the GOP entirely warm because he did not bring charges related to the Ukraine- and China-related conspiracy theories supposedly involving Joe Biden that have consumed the GOP for years, presumably because those conspiracy theories lack any basis in fact. So Weiss was left pursuing charges that should have not have been brought but without making the political interests he was pandering to particularly happy.
Nonetheless, as any watcher of Fox News well knows, during the weeks leading up to the recent Hunter Biden trial, GOP-controlled media was making as much as it possibly could out of the consolation prize of Hunter Biden being charged with lying to get a firearm, conduct that many GOP gun nuts would normally valorize. But as soon as the trial started, it became quite clear that the case was not only much less than Barr must have hoped for when his DOJ helped gin up the Hunter Biden investigation machine, but was becoming another full-fledged fiasco.
For reasons that seemed to be wholly gratuitous, if not cruel, Weiss’s prosecution team turned the gun application trial into a parade of witnesses comprised of people who had been close to Hunter Biden at the very lowest point in his life, when he was addicted to drugs and was engaging in multiple affairs and other sexual encounters, including an affair with his late brother’s wife. The ostensible purpose of the effort was to nail down the prosecution’s contention that Biden was a user at the time he purchased the gun.
But a fair observer could not help but conclude that there was another purpose at work: to impose maximum pain not only upon the defendant, but also those closest to him, not the least being his stepmother (who attended the trial) and his father.
Hunter’s conviction is a political negative — for Trump
Over the better part of a decade, the GOP has fully become Trump’s alter ego in many ways, including in mirroring his performative sadism. Trump attracts followers and flunkies who share his palpable joy and pleasure from the pain and embarrassment of others.
In that context, it’s not surprising that Trump operatives in the media and political worlds assumed Weiss’s scheme to maximize the public exposure of personal and familial pain for the Bidens would harm Joe Biden politically. But as any non-sociopath would have anticipated, the very opposite happened.
After the verdict, President Biden said the following:
I am the President, but I am also a Dad. Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery.
These words doubtlessly resonated with far too many people. It’s an unfortunate fact of life in America during the 21st century that nearly every family has been touched, and traumatized, by the horror of substance abuse, often by a child or other close family member.
Many of us have been tested, and brought near or beyond the brink, by the conduct of a relative tormented by the illness of substance abuse. Anyone who has been in that trying position understands why some are forced to distance themselves from their addicted loved ones simply as a matter of self-preservation.
But people, particularly those in families that have been touched by substance abuse, also admire parents and others who manage to continue to show love and support to those close to them suffering from addiction, despite the heavy costs and burdens involved.
Accordingly, it was not only unsurprising but to be expected that when President Biden responded to the conviction of his son by saying that he loves him and will continue to support him, the American people responded with admiration, not disapprobation. To the evident dismay of the GOP, polls indicate that Biden has paid no political price for being a good father.
Seeing that the prosecution of his son had failed to weaken the president, cynical GOP mouthpieces began asserting that charging and convicting Hunter Biden of a felony was somehow part of a conspiracy against Donald Trump. This bizarre gaslighting was the clearest indication of Republicans’ recognition that the crusade Barr initiated against the president’s son was ending ignominiously.
And so it goes. The final Trump DOJ scheme to undermine Joe Biden is going up in flames. It has led to a miscarriage of justice for Hunter Biden — who still faces yet another trial this fall on felony tax charges that should not be brought — but will do nothing to politically harm its actual target, Joe Biden.
But while Democrats can take heart from the failure of yet another Barr-era dirty trick scheme, this fiasco is another reminder, if one was needed, that Trump is willing to do whatever it takes to wreak harm on “enemies” — including people like Hunter Biden who have done absolutely nothing to him.
Furthermore, as Trump’s musings about taking revenge on his now long list of perceived foes become more angry and frequent, it’s clearer than ever that if he retakes the White House, he will not bother with the niceties of due process and right to a jury trial that Hunter Biden received. Trump is very likely to pursue entirely extralegal “justice,” throwing “enemies of the state” in jail or worse without anything close to fair trials.
Accordingly, the Hunter Biden fiasco stands as a stark warning that much worse is yet to come if voters reinstall Trump in November.
Listen to Aaron talk Sirius scoop, Hunter verdict, and more with Laura Coates
By Aaron Rupar
Yesterday, I joined Laura Coates, CNN anchor and host of SiriusXM POTUS, to discuss my headline-making scoop from earlier this week on Sinclair injecting deceptive Biden attacks into local news broadcasts, as well as the Hunter Biden conviction and notable reactions to it.
Listen to the full discussion below.
Laura is one of my favorite CNN hosts and it’s always a pleasure going on her Sirius show. It sounds like I’ll be joining her regularly going forward, so stay tuned for more. I’ll be sure to embed my segments here in the newsletter.
Finally …
Check out my supercut of Republicans kissing Trump’s rear
By Aaron Rupar
Trump was in DC yesterday to meet with House and Senate Republicans, and the Republican fawning over his visit was downright North Korean.
Trump did a brief press event during which he served up his usual word salad and reportedly behind closed doors disparaged “horrible” Milwaukee, the largest city in a key swing state and the site of the Republican National Convention next month. But listening to Republicans you’d think he solved world hunger and presented a plan for eternal piece.
Get a load of this stuff:
As Josh Marshall put it on twitter while sharing my video, “For all the ‘triumphant returns’ and ‘Trumps flexes’ and all the rest I don’t think anyone beside atrupar really captured it. This was Pyongyang in the Rotunda. The maniacal clapping in unison, MTG almost breaking down in tears cuz Trump smiled at her. Total North Korea vibe.”
In short, it’s a cult.
That’s it for this week
We’ll be back with more Monday. If you appreciate this edition, please support Public Notice by signing up. Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible.
Thanks for reading, have a great weekend, and happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. We’re taking our kiddos to a baseball game Sunday and I hope you’re able to have some fun too.
Thank you for this exhaustive and very useful summary of the process by which revenge on political opponents can be exacted. What they did to the President’s son was craven and shameful and should stand as a warning to us all.
The choice this fall can’t be any clearer. And the REALLY ironic aspect is how the GOP has for years portrayed itself as the party of family values. The image of the family of the orange felon that wouldn’t even come to support him during his trial save one compared to JRB hugging his son couldn’t make the contrast any clearer! So much for family values in MAGA land. Just keep comparing the trumps and the Bidens, DNC,